As someone who spent most of my adult life being a staffer for politicians in one capacity or another, I’m sympathetic to the breed, particularly those who labor in anonymity lest they interfere with the glory due to “the boss,” a.k.a. the Sun King, around which everyone must revolve. I know a lot of staffers shudder at many of the words that emerge from the mouth of “the boss”—even speechwriters, who must craft inanities dictated by others.

But when you get to be a flack or a mouthpiece for an elected official or a candidate, it’s a slightly different deal. Sure, you don’t get to decide most of the time what line you are peddling, but when you are out there speaking for “the boss” or trashing his or her rivals or enemies, you do put your own credibility in play. So that’s why I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Romney’s press secretary Andrea Saul, who’s getting grief for having said a lot of nasty things about Marco Rubio when she was the mouthpiece for Charlie Crist during the 2010 Senate primary in Florida. She bashed him as a wheeling-dealing “Miami lobbyiest,” hinted constantly he was corrupt, and went after him for refusing to instantly release his tax returns—ahem!—a failure she called an example of “the Rubio hustle.” Whether or not Saul winds up working cheek-by-jowl with the Miami hustler on behalf of a Romney-Rubio ticket, this stuff is pretty embarrassing.

Or is it? Saul’s not running for office, after all, and suggesting your opponent is a lying, cheating sack of manure is par for the course these days, so shouldn’t we cut her a lot of slack?

Nah, I don’t think so. It’s not that big a deal, but Saul’s discomfort, such as it is, might make other flacks (and for that matter, consultants and “strategists”) a little less blithe about mudslinging if they know they’ll be held personally accountable. One of the things that bothered me regularly when I was in Washington was how many people treated political conflict as just a cynical game that us “pros” couldn’t really take seriously, bonded as we were as fellow practitioners of the dark arts of bamboozlement. On one occasion I appeared on CSPAN opposite Grover Norquist, immediately after penning an article that left the impression that he might well be the Anti-Christ, on earth at last right there in the Beltway. I meant every word, but what made me even more uncomfortable than the smell of brimstone in the studio was Grover’s light collegial chatter during the breaks in the show, and his obvious pleasure that I had written something that treated him as infernally important. But then I remembered that Norquist eternally talked of America’s contending parties and ideological tendencies as “teams,” and realized maybe it was just a cynical game for him, no more freighted with personal investment than sports allegiances.

Since politics has the unfortunate tendency to affect real life for people who aren’t in on “the game,” it seems reasonable to hold the “players” at least minimally responsible for saying what they mean and meaning what they say—even in the heat of “the game.” And if Andrea Saul wants us to forget every word that came out of her mouth when she was playing for a different “team,” maybe we shouldn’t pay attention to those words in the first place.

At Ten Miles Square, Michael Kinsley puts his finger on something that probably defines Mitt Romney’s true bond with a Republican Party that otherwise would just as soon toss him on the dustbin of history: the cult of Success, with its creed of identifying wealth and status with virtue, and any concern for equality or fairness with vice.

As Kinsley notes, Romney talks about his own success incessantly, both as a credential for national leadership and as a response to any and all criticism:

“If people think there’s something wrong with being successful in America, then they’d better vote for the other guy,” he says. “Because I’ve been extraordinarily successful, and I want to use that success and that know-how to help the American people…”

“I stand ready to lead us down a different path, where we are lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success.”

Sure. Lovely. Let’s reward success. But the Republicans seem to think that success is self-defining. Anyone who has done well or was born well deserves what he or she has got, and maybe more, because these are society’s “job creators.”

Kinsley goes on to detail various ways in which “success” is determined by accidents of birth, not righteousness, and by luck, not pluck. Is someone remunerated for his or her work twice as much as they’d be in another country (or for that matter, in another time of history) twice as virtuous? Or as I often ask: Do people who get laid off during an economic downturn through no fault of their own become instantly less “worthy?”

No, of course, but it’s immensely comforting to the comfortable to believe not only that they have richly earned everything they’ve acquired, but that any dimunition of their wealth is an affront to morality that threatens all order and civilization. It’s a sense of entitlement far more powerful and pervasive than the much-denounced expectation of public benefits via a social safety net. And it helps justify indifference to the suffering of others—necessary, of course, to keep the virtue-machine running that is the only real alternative to anarchy—or far worse, the kind of resentment that leads people to express cold fury towards those with underwater mortgages or preexisting medical conditions. All other things being equal, I’d say resentment of other people’s failures is more inscrutable than resentment of other people’s success, since the latter have by definition received their reward and the former their punishment.

The cult of success is so central to conservative ideology in this country that it brokes little or no dissent, particularly in a Republican Party dependent on downscale white voters whose resentment of people poorer or darker or sicker than they are cannot be complicated by any doubt about the morality of markets. It’s no accident that the entire conservative commentariat came down on Newt Gingrich like a ton of bricks the moment he indulged in a producerist attack on Romney as a predatory capitalist. Start accepting fine distinctions like that, and the next thing you know you might be wondering if this banker or that oil executive is virtuous as well!

So Romney’s self-satisfaction and—yes, the word is unavoidable—self-righteousness is intergral to the world-view of the political movement he now hopes to lead to national power.

As Kinsley concludes:

I’m not ashamed to say I was successful,” Romney says. No one is asking him to be ashamed of his success. What he should be ashamed of is his complacency. It seems absurd to say so, but maybe it will take losing the presidency to teach him a little humility. If he wins, he’ll be really insufferable.

Speaking of questionable MSM reporting on political strategy, there seems to be a lot of confusion over the alleged “shift” in Obama messaging about Mitt Romney from “a flip-flopper with no core” to “severely conservative.” Today there’s a long Glenn Thrush/Jonathan Martin piece at Politico that reads like the co-authors were having an argument and just lashed it all together. One minute it seems the Obama campaign junked the “no core” attacks on the advice of Bill Clinton and pollster Benenson; then it appears they are pursuing the two themes simultaneously; and then that there is internal discord on the messaging.

The sources for the “internal discord” interpretation are not exactly unimpeachable: John Weaver, who’s fresh from conducting the train wreck that was Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign, but has apparently retained his “genius strategist” rep in some circles; and Romney’s own spokesperson Andrea Saul, who says the supposed conflict is a sign of “a White House in search of a reason for reelection.”

I don’t see a problem here. Of course the Obama camp emphasized the “no core” argument during the primaries, since it reinforced conservative doubts about Romney and also painted him as someone so character-less that he’d do or say whatever was necessary to win the nomination. Now that Mitt’s spent months and months pandering to conservative activists and blasting his opponents for ideological heresies real and imagined, it’s perfectly logical to point out how he’s harnessed himself to a political movement that’s partying like it’s 1964. But the “no core” attack line must be recalled now and then to turn on bright flashing lights whenever Romney tries to reposition himself, which he really does need to do lest he come across as Paul Ryan with a lot less personality.

Is it really confusing or risky to depict Romney as an empty suit in the thrall of radicals? Weaver says something I’ve also heard from anxious Democrats who fear that calling Romney is flip-flopper could make him more attractive to swing voters: “Being a flip-flopper might actually help Romney. It shows he’s not an unreasonable person.”

Really? People who don’t like the ideology Romney has been incessantly peddling for the last two presidential cycles are going to vote for him because they believe he’s an incorrigible liar?

I don’t think so. Mitt has built a trap for himself throughout his public career, and Team Obama would be foolish not to bait it and spring it. Persuadable voters don’t much like flip-floppers and don’t much like “severly conservative” ideologues, either. And they really don’t like pols without the character to maintain a reasonably consistent point of view even as they ingratiate themselves to people who are unreasonably enslaved to an extremist ideology against which every decision made by Romney every single day of his presidency would be policed relentlessly and viciously.

There is a lot of buzz today about a new Pew study of mainstream media coverage of the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest. According to the study, which focused on the period between November 2011 and April 15, 2012, fully 64% of news content involved “strategic elements of the GOP primary fight,” defined as “horse race, tactics, strategy, money and advertising.” This obviously dwarfed coverage of “personal issues” (12%); “domestic issues” (9%); “public record” (6%); “foreign issues” (1%); and everything else (6%). Bad as that sounds, the “strategic elements” obsession was much less severe than in the 2008 primaries, when 80% of the GOP coverage and 78% of the Democratic coverage was about this presumably non-substantive stuff.

Now before hyperventilating about the much-deplored “horse race mania” of the MSM the study seems to document, it’s helpful to think about it a bit. For one thing, there is no way around the fact that the bulk of primary coverage was devoted to primary results, and the significance of primary results to the ultimate question of identifying the party nominee: yeah, “horse race” coverage. But beyond that, much of the 2012 nominating contest has revolved around candidate efforts to outflank each other ideologically, mainly by endless assertions of their own fidelity to the Conservative Cause, and by content-light but symbolism-rich dog whistles, along with heavy-handed negative advertising disputing their rivals’ orthodoxy. When candidate A blasts candidate B for not being a “true conservative,” and this utterance (at a debate or speech or in an ad) is reported, the better reporter (or analyst) will interpret it as a strategic move, while the inexperienced writer might well just report it straight up in a way that might be coded by the monks at Pew as a reference to candidate B’s “personal issues” or “domestic issues.” To use more specific examples, on those occasions when Mitt Romney’s rivals baited him over his Massachusetts health plan, should that be reported as a discussion of “health care policy” (i.e., as a “domestic issue”) or as a strategic issue? Moreover, to the extent that Romney’s eventual victory had an awful lot to do with his effective use of superior financial resources, should discussion of money have ranked lower than the candidates’ pithy views on the Keystone XL pipeline?

Hard to say. My own feeling is that MSM coverage of the early primaries was tainted not so much by the quantity as by the quality of coverage of the “strategic elements” of the campaign. Far too much coverage, particular on the tube, was devote to raw feeds of campaign spin, and far too many “commentators” were grinding axes for a candidate or for some “signature” interpretation of how it was all going to come down on a particular night, month, or the entire cycle (and yeah, I’ll pledge guilty to that last tendency myself). As always, coverage of the primaries themselves all too often seemed gripped by a slender narrative dictated by the great god of “expectations,” with “big picture” analysis all too often failing to transcend the banalities of the “Establishment versus Tea Party feud” or some triple-loaded “next-in-line” theory based on superficial precedents.

In the end, all the coverage focused on “strategic elements” rarely seemed to capture the strangeness of the contest from beginning to end: the spectacle of last cycle’s “true conservative” candidate moving steadily to the Right yet being treated as the perennially suspect moderate RINO; the temporary emergence of fringe characters like Bachmann, Paul and Santorum as viable candidates; the serial resurrections of one of the 20th century’s least popular politicians, Newt Gingrich; the rapid deflation of the one-time behemoth Rick Perry based on a few bad moments in debates; the bizarre moment when Herman Cain, a man with no record and virtually no visible campaign, zoomed to the top of the polls. Perhaps the most accurate coverage might have been someone shrieking repeatedly at the Republican electorate, What the hell are you thinking?

In any event, a deliberately wonky and non-strategic coverage philosophy that treated 9-9-9 or fetal personhood as an interesting new idea among “domestic issues” would have kind of missed the point of a political party whose voters were simultaneously on a drunken ideological bender, yet were coolly calculating how much radicalism might be sneaked into the White House thanks to a bad economy and an unlucky incumbent. In that respect, the 2012 contest has been simply incomparable.

On second pot of coffee, courting hyperventilation. Hear are some dunking sticks for your mid-day cuppa joe:

* Sure enough, Sarko’s first move in his second-round competition with Francois Hollande is to suck up to National Front voters. Pas d’ennemis a droite!

* Cynthia McKinney running again for House seat she’s lost twice in Democratic primaries—but this time on the Green ticket.

* Jon Huntsman gets publicity for comparing GOP to ChiComs, then complains about getting publicity.

* Claire McCaskill launches direct attack on Super-PACs.

* George Will disses Jebbie, says GOP can’t afford another Bush on national ticket.

And in non-political news:

* Belated happy 100th birthday to Fenway Park! Too bad Yankees gave it a Bronx cheer.

Back very shortly.

It’s kind of pathetic that some conservatives are experiencing schadenfreude over the self-destruction of John Edwards, as though it has anything to do with his party affiliation, ideology or issue stands. But in any event, they should not go here:

With John Edwards’ trial for alleged campaign finance violations set to commence Monday, a CBS News/New York Times poll measured the former North Carolina senator’s favorability rating. The results are outstanding for Edwards. Outstandingly bad: 3% favorable, 41% not favorable, 15% undecided, 35% haven’t heard enough, 6% refused….

Most exciting, however, is that the poll provides writers the opportunity to write a sentence that many thought might never be written. The last such poll of former Vice President Dick Cheney — from 2010 — showed Edwards’ 2004 electoral nemesis with a 36 percent favorability rating. That means Cheney is over 10 times more popular than someone or something, in this case one Mr. John Edwards. Cheney. Over 10 times. More. Popular. Those words may have never appeared in a sentence before — and may never again.

I agree with that last part, but funny as this is to the folks at the Daily Caller, the funnier thing is that in the very poll they cite, Dick Cheney’s unfavorable number (52%) is higher than Edwards’ (41%) today, by a full eleven points. Sure, nobody likes Edwards these days, but despite his truly epic mendacity and his reputation as the Worst Political Husband Ever, he can’t manage to gain more enemies than his 2004 sparring partner.

One of the positive byproducts of the looming threat that the Supreme Court will declare the Affordable Care Act (or key elements of it) unconstitutional is that more attention is gradually being paid to what, exactly, ObamaCare’s Republican critics would do to deal with the cost, access and quality issues it was designed to address.

There’s a solid new LA Times article by Noam Levey that provides a good refresher course on Mitt Romney’s latest health care proposals, which are sort of an amalgam of what George W. Bush and John McCain proposed a few years back, along with the Ryan Budget’s treatment of Medicare and Medicaid.

But TNR’s Jonathan Cohn has the best succinct description of how it all adds up:

Estimates of House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposal, which Romney has embraced and which would likely be similar to his approach, have suggested that the cuts to Medicaid alone could take health insurance away from between 14 and 27 million people. That’s not including those who would lose out on coverage they stand to get, right now, from the Affordable Care Act.

Not that Republicans seem to care much. They like to say their focus is on “cost” as opposed to “coverage.” I’m sure it’s an effective line politically: It suggests that Republicans are focused on the deserving insured, while Democrats are spending their time (and your money) on the less deserving uninsured.

But that claim highly misleading. Under the Republican proposals, insurance would become cheaper mostly because it would cover less and would be available to fewer people who need it. Conservatives believe their system would encourage competition, but, more likely, it would encourage the kind of competition we have already: A competition among insurers to insure the least risky beneficiaries, rather than a competition to provide more efficient care to people who actually need medical care.

So the “Replace” in the GOP “Repeal and Replace” agenda for health reform is a complete fraud in the sense that it does not even attempt to address the challenge of achieving universal access to affordable health care. The last large-scale effort by a Republican politician to do that was in Massachusetts, and it depended strictly on a federal commitment to Medicaid that its author now wants to scrap, along with a national version of his own handiwork. “Repeal and Ignore” would be a more accurate slogan.

If you had to typecast the gazillionaires who are increasingly dominating American politics, you’d probably think of two parallel “types.” One is the eccentric Daddy Warbucks with a pet cause or two and the kind of ego that dictates collecting politicians the way some of their peers collect art or vintage automobiles. Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who almost single-handedly financed Newt Gingrich’s presidential run until the wheels fell off, fits it to a tee. And then you have the mega-rich zealots with a broader commitment not just to pols but to an ideological infrastructure—one that often very nicely meshes with the zealots’ business interests. Once the Brothers Hunt exemplified this type; now it’s the Brothers Koch.

But as Charles Homan (a former Washington Monthly editor) amply illustrated in a vast profile of the man for TNR, the new face of political money may belong to an old figure in Texas circles: Harold Simmons of Dallas.

[T]his February…Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings revealed [Simmons] to be the single largest contributor in American politics. In late March, the Dallas billionaire told the Journal that, along with his wife and his holding company, Contran, he had donated $18.7 million to Republican political organizations—not just Crossroads ($14.5 million) but also independent expenditure groups aligned with Mitt Romney ($800,000), Rick Santorum ($1.2 million), Newt Gingrich ($1.1 million), and Rick Perry ($1.1 million)—and that he planned to give nearly twice that much by November.

Simmons doesn’t seem to be a nut or a crank, and as his contributions this year show, isn’t into being the godfather for any particular pol. He seems to believe spreading a lot of money around on behalf of Republican politics at every level will give him both friends and policies that will enable him to make a whole lot more money. And so he keeps on turning up at key moments when some ready cash can make a difference, as in 2004 when he and fellow-Texan Bob Perry sank a large chunk of change into an obscure group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. As Homans reports, Simmons was the first big donor to go “all in” for his old buddy Karl Rove when American Crossroads was set up (Simmons, Perry, and another Texas friend, Robert Rowling, have ponied up over half of the Super-PAC’s war chest so far).

But it’s not like his contributions are philanthropic, or even broadly ideological. Simmons has invested heavily in creating a sort of Disney World for Nuclear Waste in West Texas that has already boosted his net worth by billions—but requires friendly politicians in Austin, in Washington, and in other states contributing low-level nuclear waste to the site. In particular, he could use the kind of expedited nuclear plant approval process that Mitt Romney has promised to create. As Julie Bykowicz of Bloomberg reported recently, an even bigger bonanza could come Simmons’ way if a future administration approves his site as an alternative to Yucca Mountain for high-level nuclear waste. He’s basically conducting a multi-layered strategy to attract deposits from every conceivable direction:

“Whatever federal switch has to be thrown to get uranium into the hole, believe me, it will be thrown; that’s how Harold Simmons works,” said Glenn Lewis, a former Texas environmental employee who retired in protest to Simmons’s influence in the state permitting process for his dump.

So you’ve got a very politically sophisticated tycoon looking to make many billions of dollars via inherently political decisions—in an atmosphere where the rules for the use of private money in national politics have very quickly come to emulate the wide-open system that has made Texas a corporate paradise.

It’s a scary scenario, but one we’d better get used to, particularly if Simmons’ new friend Mitt Romney becomes president.

From the perspective of 2010, it was a big deal that Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch easily turned back an effort to deny him renomination at a state GOP convention over the weekend. After all, his former colleague Bob Bennett didn’t, finishing a poor third at the 2010 convention.

But in terms of the long-range interests of the Conservative Movement, and the power it exercises within the GOP, the Hatch scenario may have been pretty much ideal. They get another shot at Hatch in a June primary, since the incumbent just fell short of the 60% of state convention delegates needed to secure outright renomination. But just as importantly, they get an ideologically chastened Senator no matter who wins. That’s why the measured gloating we’re hearing from Hatch’s nemesis FreedomWorks, which has already spent $700,000 in ads bashing him, is a bit more than spin:

Russ Walker, national political director for the [FreedomWorks] super PAC, said Saturday that the measure of the tea party’s success was less about the outcome and more about the steps that Hatch needed to take to advance.

“We think it’s a victory either way because Orrin Hatch has had to become very conservative and he’s made a lot of promises to his constituents that he’s going to vote that way over the next six years,” Walker said shortly before delegates voted. “How can you say we lost our mojo when Orrin Hatch had to run to the right of all the other candidates?”

That’s all the more striking because, as I noted in an earlier post, Hatch just hates—or to use his term, “despises”—these guys. If he could, he’d probably go out of his way to cast a vote or two in the Senate designed strictly to thumb his nose at the Tea Partiers. But he knows that the famous Goldwater line from his 1964 presidential nomination acceptance speech—“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”—might as well be the party’s official slogan today.

While French president Nicolas Sarkozy is the pol with the bullseye painted on his back after this weekend’s first round of elections, he’ll share the pain with his close associate Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Indeed, the French elections were not the sole setback for “Merkozy,” as a center-right government committed to European austerity policies fell in the Netherlands on Saturday and huge anti-austerity protests broke out in Prague.

American media coverage of the second round of the French elections will probably focus on Sarkozy’s efforts to corral most of the 18% of the vote won by far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen; the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric could get shockingly thick. But even in the unlikely event Sarkozy defeats Socialist Francois Hollande, it’s pretty clear he’d be under great public pressure to either break with Merkel or at least use his leverge with her to secure a moderation of austerity policies.

Events over the weekend illustrate one very big difference between European and American politics at present: the hard-core “populist” European Right, as reflected by Le Pen and by the Dutch Freedom Party’s Geert Wilders (who brought down a pro-austerity government), is not very supportive of the commitment to fiscal retrenchment that is the signature of the Tea Party Movement here. If a Left-Right convergence against austerity gains strength, Merkel could soon become very lonely, aside from her fan base among American deficit hawks.

You may have heard about a new report last week from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting about the domination of the big Sunday TV talk shows by Republican men. It didn’t get much better yesterday as the big topic of discussion, believe it or not, was the mini-scandal involving the Secret Service and Colombian hookers:

Fallout from the Secret Service prostitution scandal dominated the Sunday morning talk shows, with members of both parties defending Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan but warning that problems at the agency must be ferreted out to restore trust in the group.

Six Secret Service agents have resigned or retired after it was exposed some members of President Obama’s advance detail hired prostitutes during an ahead of a presidential visit to the country. Eleven agents and nine members of the U.S. military have been implicated in the scandal. Both the House and Senate have opened investigations into the matter.

“I would expect within a very near future to have several other Secret Service agents leaving the agency of those 11,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said his concern was fixing the Secret Service culture.

“Obviously nobody believes that something with 11 or 12 people involved couldn’t have happened before,” Issa said. “The real point is will we have confidence that it will never happen again, particularly for nationals having access to our men and women in the Secret Service.”

Oh, brother. The spectacle of Peter King and Darrell Issa nattering about this nothing-burger of a story undoubtedly has a place on television. It’s on CSPAN, in the wee hours, perhaps in August.

Just a couple notes before I close up shop:

* No, your eyes weren’t deceiving you as you watched those Sunday shows today. There really were a whole lotta Republican white guys on. ThinkProgress has the deets on the demographic make-up of the Sunday show guest contingent, noting that, in Sundayshowland, women are most likely to be represented by Michele Bachmann, and African-Americans, by Herman Cain.

* When the Pulitzer Prizes were announced this week, the buzz was more focused on the award not given than those that were. The committee did not see fit to issue an award for fiction this year, apparently having deemed all the nominated books unworthy. At the New Yorker’s blog, Avi Steinberg offers a most amusing bit of satire, “Pulitzer: the Leaked Fiction Memos.” My personal fave:

Text message from Pulitzer Board Chief to Board Member No. 5:
sry 4 typ0s. drvng on the hghwy. brrw yr swmplndya? lost mne @ knicks gme!!

And with that, I bid you farewell for now. Thanks so much for having me, and for the comments.

In an interview with CNN’s Candy Crowley this morning, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida seemed to change his tune about whether or not he would accept the number-two slot on the G.O.P. presidential ticket were it to be offered him.

Rubio used to say he wasn’t interested, but today he simply said he wouldn’t discuss the possibility. Via TPM:

“Up to now, it’s all been theoretical,” Rubio explained, but now the party has a nominee who has begun the process of finding a running mate. “Moving forward, we’re gonna let his process play itself out,” Rubio said.

Now, this will likely provoke another round of scoffing from liberal commentators about how unlikely Rubio is to help Romney win Latino votes. And I agree. But that wouldn’t be the point of a Rubio veep pick.

When Republicans choose people of color or members of minority groups for positions of power within their nearly nativist party, it’s rarely because they expect that person to bring a flood of votes from the constituency group their identity symbolizes. It’s to assuage the fears of swing voters, who generally don’t like to vote for people who seem to be extreme. So, the pick of a Latino veep would signal to white suburbanites that, despite his embrace of the G.O.P.’s anti-immigrant policies, Mitt Romney is not really an anti-immigrant kind of a guy. See? He even has a Latino running mate. And with Florida being a state whose inclinations can hang by a chad, a Floridian might make a wise pick indeed.

CNN’s video of the Rubio interview is here.

The New York Times is out today with a couple of monster investigative stories, one on a major bribery scandal involving officials of Wal-Mart and the Mexican government, and another on the American Legislative Exchange Council, of which Wal-Mart remains a stalwart member, even as a cadre of big corporations make their exodus from the group that peddled the legislation that became Florida’s infamous “Stand Your Ground” law.

The Wal-Mart story, reported by the outstanding David Barstow (who was among the first to report on ties between the Tea Party movement and militia groups), centers on revelations about years of bribes paid to Mexican officials in Wal-Mart’s quest for “market dominance” in Mexico. In 2005, a lawyer who had overseen the permitting process for construction of Wal-Mart’s Mexican stores provided Wal-Mart honchos with detailed evidence of shady dealings, Barstow writes, setting off an internal investigation that documented “suspect payments totaling more than $24 million.” According to Barstow:

The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation.

Instead, an examination by The New York Times found, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut it down.

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